In current pollen identification, the similarity of morphological
features of oak pollen under Light Microscopy (LM), the tricolporate and
verrucate pollen grains, only allows identification of oak pollen as theQuercus genus. Based on Liu et al.’s (2007) study, the
morphological features that distinguish Quercus pollen of
different species are less than 200-250 nm in size, the limit of the
resolution of conventional light microscopes (LM). Besides, Scanning
Electron Microscopy (SEM) can take images with a magnification range of
30X to 800,000X. Image resolutions of 0.6nm (30kV and 3.5nm-1kV) are
possible with secondary electron images (UC Berkeley, Electron
Microscope Lab). Recent SEM studies of oak pollen morphology focus on
describing general morphological characteristics of oak species in
certain regions, which don’t include California. The aim of this article
is to evaluate the micro-morphological surface features observed under
the SEM and morphological features observed under the LM to
classification and differentiation between phylogenetic lineages of Quercus native to California.